text: Black & White - Walkthrough Von: "Elliott" INDEX 1. Version History 2. Introduction 3.Doesn't exist 4. The Basic Gameplay 4.1 Playing Good 4.2 Playing Evil 5. Creature Training 5.1 Basic knowledge 5.2 Basic behaviour 5.3 Basic learning 5.4 Specific creature actions 5.4.1 The urges of feeding and sleeping 5.4.2 The eating of villagers 5.4.3 The art of throwing objects 5.4.4 The assisting in village duties 5.4.5 The importance of housekeeping 6. Village Management 7. Island specific tips and secrets 7.1 The first island 7.2 The second island 7.3 The third island 7.4 The fourth island 7.5 The fifth island 8. Silver scroll solutions 8.1 Quests on the first island 8.1.1 Throwing Stones 8.1.2 The Savior 8.1.3 The Lost Flock 8.1.4 The Singing Stones (1) 8.1.5 The Explorers 8.1.6 The Pied Piper 8.1.7 The Hermit 8.1.8 The Ogre 8.1.9 Mushroom cooking quest 8.2 Quests on the second island 8.2.1 The Plague 8.2.2 The Sacrifice 8.2.3 The Sea 8.2.4 The Singing Stones (2) 8.2.5 The Beach Temple Puzzle 8.2.6 The Greedy Farmer 8.2.7 The Idol 8.2.8 The Slavers 8.2.9 The Riddles 9. General Questions 9.1 Where can I find Easter eggs in the game? 9.2 How does one use miracle dispensers? 9.3 What makes the creature grow faster? 9.4 What do I need to do to unlock all the creatures? 9.5 How can I backup my creature? 10. Final Notes 11. Credits 2. INTRODUCTION 3. Yip , like i said (don't exist) 4. THE BASIC GAMEPLAY First of all, there is no way to skip the tutorial. By watching the Forums and various IRC channels, I'd say that this is a very good feature (the manual is rather weak anyway). Second, read the signs. Third, read the signs. Always read the friggin' signs! Signs next to houses contains valuable information about what's in the house and how to operate it. Signs in the terrain can contain valuable information on how to properly train your creature, or small gameplay tricks, or even hints on how to accomplish certain goals. The game teaches you the basic gameplay very well, if you'll just have the patience to look, and it will be much easier than reading a tutorial (and if you are intelligent enough to appreciate a long detailed tutorial, you have probably learned your basic gameplay already, so I won't waste space writing about it). I will say this for a reminder, though: Leaving your hand on an object is Very useful (for example over a construction site where you'll find out the exact amount of wood needed for completition or over a village totem to find out how many people your village has room for). The sections below will go into a bit more detail. Note that these sections try to cover both extremes. That is, if you want a white, or even rainbow colored creature or hand, read how to play good. If you want a black creature with horns, and a red hand, read how to play evil. If you just want to stay neutral, mix in a little of both. 4.1 PLAYING GOOD Now this is a challenge. Here you will need to spend a lot of time managing your villages, which is an utter pain. But you cannot neglect your creature either, if you want it to be good aligned too, and performing the two together can initially be extremely difficult. If you train your creature well though, you might be able to leave it on it's own for an extended period of time, while you are away managing your villages. Staying good means that you must have the flags of a village storage raised as low as possible, or even not raised at all. This is an enormous task in itself. But not only that, you will have to carefully watch all your worshippers at the temple shrines so they don't starve and die, which even Blackie disapproves of! You must also act passive, and avoid any killing whatsoever. This means that taking full control of an island will be done by sending missionaries, traders, yourself and your creature to enemy villages to assist and impress them with miracles, food and wood. The Flying Creatures miracle and Heal also work fine to generate lots of belief. It is unconfirmed though, that casting lots of heal on villagers will cause them to live longer, and thus, in the long run, increase faster in numbers since less people die and disappear. You can train your creature to only heal sick villagers, though. Zoom in far and listen to pain sounds or watch for crawling villagers, then target a heal miracle on them and have the creature watch with the Learning Rope. This may take time, though, since it's not often villagers get sick. Also, don't overfeed your villagers, since with lots of food comes the desire to breed, and with the desire to breed comes the desire to expand, and soon enough there won't be any empty spots on the island to expand upon (much less any forests left). As a good player, you can also sacrifice at the temple shrines to get Prayer power, if you want. A shrubbery and any other plant will work fine. Never try to sacrifice a stone, though. It will cause damage to your shrine and scatter your worshippers! And even if you get attacked by an enemy, you cannot fight back! Use the shield miracles to protect your villagers, and try not to have your creature attack another creature unless it's wreaking havoc in one of your village. Your creature may get provoked into a fight as it is. So if it is so frustrating to play good, what are the rewards? Well, if you don't know the answer to that, my bet is that your creature won't turn rainbow coloured anytime soon. Some of the visual effects of playing good are: a white temple, white hand, white creature, clear skies, longer days, shorter nights and a rainbow over your temple. 4.2 PLAYING EVIL First of all, evil isn't stupid and it isn't nasty. It's sinister and devious. If you kill for fun, sure you are evil, but you are mainly being blunt, and there's much worse you can do than that. Try torturing people with fire instead, starve them, wreck their homes, play catch with your creature using villagers or just leave the creature with the Aggression Leash on in one of your own villages... Be creative. Since you can do pretty much anything while being evil, I won't dig deep into the details here. I will try to give out a few usefully tips, though. Being evil will finally let you ignore feeding the worshippers at your shrines. There are much better ways of gaining miracle power than dancing. Sacrificing new born children for example, is much more effective. Sacrificing your dead does also work. If you want to wipe out a village, or atleast cause serious damage, you can taint a food storage by throwing a toadstool or poop in it. Some of the visual effects of playing evil are: a black temple with spikes, red hand with long nails, black creature which grows horns, red skies, and everlasting nights. 5. CREATURE TRAINING Be aware that you can only have ONE creature for each player profile and that creature will be constant in ALL games you play using it. It will grow older and remember everything you have done, no matter how much you load the game or if you pause your campaign to play a skirmish or multiplayer game. The only way to reset a creature is to restart your game. Your creature does not have to be of the same alignment as you do. The creature can be so good it glows white, while at the same time, your Castle is growing spikes. Also note that initially the Creature Help doesn't show up in the game, even if you have it activated in the Options. The first time it will show up is after you have activated the final golden scroll on the first island, but it will stay activated after that, even if you restart a new game or load an earlier save. If you start an online game or a skirmish game though, the creature help will also get activated and stay so, at least until a part of the tutorial kicks in again, whereupon it will become deactivated (so just save, start skirmish and then load, to get it back). 5.1 BASIC KNOWLEDGE In order to develop a healthy creature, you need to know about it's vital statistics. Those are the stats which can be seen when you focus a creature, and are also the only stats which can kill it. The vital stats are Damage, Hunger and Tiredness. In order to develop a well trained creature, you also need to know about a number of other statistics. These can be found in the Creature Cave, and though they are not vital, they still represents some sort of basic need for the creature. Those stats which are non-vital are Exhaustion, Dehydration, Strength, Fatness and Poop. In addition to this, there are a number of trivial stats, which isn't really important to the creature, but which may be important to you. These stats are Alignment and Growth. Further, the creature uses Energy in order to cast it's own miracles. All of these stats should be kept as low as possible, with Energy as the only exception. Energy gets lower when the creature casts a miracle. When Energy runs out, it won't be able to cast miracles any more and must feed in order to raise the stat again. Illness and Warmth will be explained at a later point. When a vital stat gets maxed out, your creature will collapse and Regenerate back in it's pen at your Temple. The stat will still remain high after that, so you need to take care of your creature in order to prevent it from collapsing again. Have your creature collapse too much, and it will shrink noticeably in size (although it will grow back in size over time). Note that when a creature collapses, you may still have a few seconds to try to fix the situation (heal or feed it), if you are lucky. Also, the creature will over time forget things, and may have to relearn it. The same goes for strength. It will need constant exercise in order to keep itself fit and keep it's strength up. 5.2 BASIC BEHAVIOUR You should know that the creature knows a number of actions by instinct. These actions are mostly those it uses to stay alive, like sleeping, eating, drinking and pooping. But encouraging or discouraging these actions may have several different outcomes, which will be explained in a later section. The creature can also learn a few new actions, either on it's own or by copying you. However, the amount of these actions are not that important. The thing which is important are the variations of these actions. The creature does not simply observe you doing something. It observs exactly what you did, what you used and to what or whom you did it! It can also learn whole series of actions in a later stage. Training a creature is accomplished by encouraging and discouraging Different variations of actions by either stroking or slapping the creature accordigly. The way the creature carries out it's actions also determines (or may be determined by) it's mental state. The creature may show you how it is feeling if you focus on it and you can also read alot about what is going on in it's mind in the Creature Cave. If you want your creature to like you more, pay more attention to you or show you it's feeling more, just stroke it when it asks for attention or wants to mess around (but not too much, since that will only cause the creature to get distracted and stop to look at you when your hand is near it). Keep in mind that the creature's AI is very short- sighted and not very reflective. It does not understand alot of effects of it's actions so if there is a bad side-effect on a particular action (either by accident or all the time) only slap it if you do not want it to continue doing that action anymore. For example, the creature always throws an object over it's shoulder when it doesn't know what to do with it. If that object damages anything (stone on a house) or becomes damaged (villager down a cliff) the creature don't know how to associate that event with what it just did. So there is no way to punish it for that, as it doesn't count as an action (neither can you slap the creature for noticing either, since that is a separate action). You simply have to wait until the creature has learned to properly deal with the object, whereupon it will pick up and put down the object properly. 5.3 BASIC LEARNING If you want the perfect creature, hang around on the tutorial island Until it has learned every possible thing to be learned there (some spells will be unavailable as well as certain methods for helping villagers). Your villages on the tutorial island won't have any high demands (since you can't build anything) and as long as you don't active the final golden scroll, there is no time limit. Note that it is rather hard to become immensely good during the tutorial islands. This is probably due to not all features being activated yet. For those of you interested in AI, the game supports both supervised and unsupervised learning, as well as reinforcement learning. A decision tree is also used to select which action a creature will perform. The first method of learning is simply to show your creature what to do. Leash it with the Learning Rope and carry out the exact action you want it to perform. Make sure that it is watching you, or your actions will have little effect. Note that you shouldn't stroke the creature for simply noticing what you Just did (it will point in the direction of your action, and then look at you). The real reward should come first after it has properly copied your action. Sometimes the creature will understand immediately and copy you, sometimes, it takes forever to get it to do the same thing as you. A second method of learning is to let the creature find things out by itself. But, if you let the creature wander around and it accidently manages to learn something you didn't want it to know about, you will have to spend a lot of time supressing that behaviour, since nothing can be "unlearned" once found out. In order to properly control a creature's behaviour you need to catch it at a precise moment in order to get a precise response out of it. If you are too late in praising or punishing your creature, you may affect a whole different action. This means that you may need to anticipate what your creature is going to do. Get to know your creature! This is the only way to be safe. You sometimes also have to plan ahead. When you start out, the creature will only perform basic stuff. Later on, you will want it to carry out more complex series of actions, and if you haven't taught it the basic stuff properly, it can be too late when one of the basic things it got wrong is a part of a more complex series of actions (for example, when picking up a tree is a part of the being generous to villagers action in order to resupply the storage). Though the game says that handing the creature a one-shot miracle will cause it to instantly cast it, it has to be trained to cast those too (you will have to slap it for eating or loosing the miracles). Note that your creature may see more detail than you are aware of. If you cast, for example, heal on healthy villagers and water on grown trees, the creature may do so too. A better way is to only cast heal on unhealthy villagers and tiny trees. All of the above applies for fighting too. Tell your creature to move around a lot, and it will do it by itself after awhile. The same goes for concentrating attacks on special body parts (note which targeted body part carries out the different attacks you want it to perform more). 5.4 SPECIFIC CREATURE ACTIONS The previous sections were meant to be very general. Anything you read in Those sections can be applied to any action no matter what creature you have. And if you can't get your creature to do what you want, try again until it grasps the concept or change your method of teaching. Please don't mail me simply stating that you can't get your creature to do what you want it to. It's not the creature who hasn't tried it's best, it's you. 5.4.1 THE URGES OF FEEDING AND SLEEPING ***************** BUG WARNING!***************************** When the creature eats fish by itself, it will lower that creature's alignment! I do hope that this is a bug which will be fixed, since fish is the absolutely best source of food (and you cannot make diciple herders on your own in order to make sure proper meat doesn't run out). Your creature also seems to get hungrier whenever it eats fish, which is fishy... ************************************************************ First of all, getting it to eat and sleep on it's own is rather easy. However, trying to control how fast it gets hungry and how fast it gets tired can be a nightmare. Sometimes, the effects of slapping and stroking can seem to be totally at random. In this section, you will find some helpful tips, although you should still be very careful, since they will not always work. Only slap or stroke your creature a little bit a time, in order to minimize the damage of a wrong outcome. Since the creature will initially eat anything, sleep anywhere and poop everywhere, basic training goal of basic training will mostly be to control these behaviours. You may have noticed that discouraging the creature from being just generally tired may either make it sleep less, lie down less on that location or become less tired. The outcome may seem to be selected totally at random. Careful consideration is a must before punishing or praising the creature. For example, when it sleeps you have to factor in several things. How sleepy was it? Was the creature exhausted or low on energy? When did it go to sleep and where did it lie down? Your creature will also initially eat any moveable object. However, it has a built in learning factor here, since it will puke up anything that isn't good for it (grain which isn't ripe, for example). The creature can also eat on by it's own initiative or by command (rubbing the belly when given food). But before you slap or stroke the creature for eating, there are a also number of factors you must consider. Consider what it is eating. Is it a food source which is good for him or not? Does the source replenish itself fast or slow? Is it stealing from someone? Is it eating because of hunger or greed? To get a creature to eat more of a certain type of food, just hand feed it with the food you want to increase it's apetite for and stroke the creature after it has finished eating. This will always make it appreciate that type of food more (note that this isn't an exception to the above rule since you carry out the action here and then reward the creature for the effect). And yes, overfeeding will cause it to poop more and get fat. To get it thinner again, just keep it hungry a bit longer and don't feed it as much for a period of time, and it's weight will go down. Water is lacking a graph in the creature info (although you can read it's dehydration level in the Creature Cave), but it is not that important since the creature always knows how to drink and will do so when thirsty (and since it's not that often, you shouldn't need to adjust it's drinking habits if you don't feel you simply have to). There doesn't seem to be any way to bring a creature water. Finally, fish would be the recommended food for any creature, since fish regenerate well without any care and it won't be considered stealing from the village. Cattle and other animals regenerate much slower and can run out if you're not careful (and though herders help, there is a strange lack of a herding disciple in the game). 5.4.2 THE EATING OF VILLAGERS This can be considered a special case of feeding. Now you either want to Or don't want to have the creature eat villagers, depending on you alignment. An untrained creature, even if it is a Cow or a Sheep, will sooner or later eat a villager if you have it wander the village hungry. Initially, this can work to your advantage if you keep a close eye on your creature. When the creature picks up a village, immediately focus it. If it shows you that it is hungry, slap it silly. If it doesn't show you it's intentions, unfocus and quickly click on the ground next to it to make it drop the villager. Stroke it for that action, if you wish. You can also slap the creature after it has eaten a villager, but only if you get the a Help Text saying that "your creature will eat more of that stuff" (if you slap it without that text appearing, you may affect another action). Also, stroke the creature if you want it to continue eating villagers. Although, remember that an empty village belongs to nobody, and that strength comes in numbers. And note that even if you have taught your creature not to eat people From YOUR villages, there is nothing which stops it from eating people from other, neutral or enemy owned, villages. You'll have to teach it how to behave to other villagers separately. 5.4.3 THE ART OF THROWING OBJECTS --------------- REQUEST FOR INFORMATION! ------------------- You can give, or throw (if you have taught it to catch) the creature a much larger object than it can normally be commanded to pick up by itself. Does anyone know why this is? Throwing (as with kicking) seems to be an aggressive action, so if you want a passive creature, slap it for throwing stuff. The exception is when it is throwing trees or food into the village storage, which doesn't beem to count neither as a throw or an aggressive action (same goes for when it's playful). The biggest question seems to be how to get the creature to throw stones. But if you are looking to increase the strength of the creature, remember that the sign said that the creature needed only to be carrying stones. To exercise it, simply give your creature a stone and action click on a piece of ground away from it and walk or run it around the island for a hile. The creature's strength will increase over time because of this. Anyway, if your creature can copy you throwing stones, all is well, and it should be praised for it. Note that the creature will take notice of where you aim your stone and even if you fetch the stone back or not. If the creature refuses to copy your actions, things may get more complicated. Action clicking on an object with a leashed creature is tated to be the command of getting it to pick the object up. However, his doesn't always work with stones. A reason of this may be that the stone is too large. But if you crush the stone into smaller pieces while the creature is watching, it may very well copy that action instead the next time it is told to pick up a stone, so be careful. A better course of action is to crush a number of stones far away from the creature and have it travel there only after they are the appropriate size. I personally can't see any use in throwing an object other than a stone, so when the creature tries that, just slap it to keep it from doing that again. Also, don't make the mistake of praising it too early. f you want it to throw a rock, don't praise it immediately after it's picked the rock up, since it will most definitely eat the rock instead. The creature can also be trained to catch stones (and other objects... Such as fireballs). Have it in a playfull mode and practice with the beach ball. Just hrow the ball at it at the appropriate height and it should try to catch it after awhile. Then move on to other objects you want it to catch. Sometimes, double-clicking on a spot on the ground when the creature is holding a stone will make it throw the stone there, but I haven't nailed down the details around this yet, as it may run to that spot also. 5.4.4 THE ASSISTING IN VILLAGE DUTIES ---------------------- REQUEST FOR INFORMATION! ------------ Is it just me, or does the creature always seem to forget how to use the village store? ------------------------------------------------------------ ******* BUG WARNING!******************************** If your creature picks up a villager who has just died and turned into a skeleton, the skeleton will come to life and walk around the village! This may be a side-effect of the healing effect being picked up by a creature instills, but it's still a bug. And if your creature decides to eat a Dead villager, it will count asHaving killed a person! Also, some people do say that the creature can make diciples other than breeders, but I have seen NO evidence of this. The creature always seem to create a diciple breeder if it cuddles a villager (even if there is nobody around to "mate" with, and even if there is, action clicking on the ground to make the creature drop the villager will NOT produce a breeder). It must be a bug, or have a really weird explanation. If you play the game by micromanaging your villages, you will almost certainly spend such a large amount of time doing it that the creature automatically will adapt your actions over time. However, if you do have trouble teaching it to help villagers, have the creature leashed to you using the Learning Rope, while you perform the actions you want it to adopt. Performing the same actions in different ways may also help. For example, the food storage can be filled by either dropping, for example, rain on it or by casting a food miracle on it. Note that having a creature leashed to a building won't automatically make thecreature interact with the building unless you have taught it what to do. In fact, it seems to be a rather poor use of the leash (except for a well trained creature, but even then, unrestricting it's area of movement will most definitely have it moving out of the village sooner or later). And, if you do have your creature leashed to a building in the village, make sure you unleash it when it needs food and sleep, which it otherwise might not prioritise. An area of trouble seems to be if you want to have your creature deliver food to the worshippers at your temple. This is very hard for it to copy, since there doesn't seem to be a clear distinction between the different parts of the temple to your creature (it seems to regard the tower, the surrounding shrines and it's pen as one and the same). If you have taught your creature the Food miracle, however, the best way Is simply to leash it to the food desire flag on a temple shrine and have It figure out by itself that it should cast a miracle on the worshippers. Remember to stroke the creature when it gets it right. This method is very effective. Also, if your creature is kind to the villagers, it may pick one up from time to time, pat the villager a little and then put it back down. That villager will then have a very high chance of turning into a diciple breeder! This can happen very often with a creature which is kind to villagers, so be watchful of your creature so your villagers won't cause overbreeding which is a nightmare. So, if you want your creature to continue being nice to villagers, but not create that many breeders, leash it the moment it picks up a villager. Then action click by it's feet to make it put the villager down and make the creature do something more usefull instead. The best thing is to assign all diciples yourself. Remember which villagers you put to work far from your village, and seek them out when you have your creature leashed to the Learning Rope. Diciples who work far from home have to travel great distances and will have less time to go to the storage for food or go home and sleep very often and because of this, their health will deteriorate. So, cast Heal miracles on these villagers and make sure your creature notices it. Then give it a big reward when it casts Heal on a villager itself. The deaths in the village will get lower over time if your creature learns this well. 5.4.5 THE IMPORTANCE OF HOUSEKEEPING ********************* BUG WARNING! ************************* People in the forums are suggesting that crapping is evil (you can't imagine how hard it was to type that sentence... my mouth hurts from laughing). It sounds like another alignment bug to me. ************************************************************ An untrained creature will have a rather high urge to poop anytime and anywhere. It is uncertain how the villagers react to having poop all over The place, but I suspect that they might not approve. You can actually teach your creature to stop pooping entirely. To do this, slap it immediately when you first witness the creature pooping against something. Hopefully, the creature will still need to poop, and will show you this By farting. Slap it again, but this time give it a good go. Sometimes, this is enough to have it give up ever wanting to poop again. (Though it's unknown if this will have any damaging effect on the creature.) Although it has been suggested that you should train your creature to poop in the fields, it seems to be of little use. Personally, I'd rather use the Water miracle, as it is much more effective and pleasant. 6. VILLAGE MANAGEMENT ***************** BUG WARNING! **************************** If you drop too much food in a temple shrine, the ENTIRE PILE will be Gobbled up a second the next time a worshipper decides to eat. Since you don't get any Prayer Energy for this, a sacrifice of the leftover food hasn't been made, so it would seem that this indeed is a bug! The expand desire flag is also unreliable. Once you create a construction Site for a building, the flag will slide down and disappear completely, but once the building is finished, it will pop right up to the top again! A similar behaviour can be seen on some fields, if you empty all food and sometimes when you water them (field height will then jump up and down). Seems like some graphical bugs to me, but still... ************************************************************ Though handling the creature might be a large part of the game, next to managing a village, getting a creature trained is a piece of cake. If you Want to play really good, satisfying all the needs of the villagers will Become so time consuming that you might find it's suddenly all you do. Now, I always knew that this was true in the real world, but it's nice to Find that they accurately portrayed this in Black & White too: Animals are smarter than people! Humans are the most annoying thing in the game. They are never satisfied, always want more, they devour natural resources in seconds, breed like rabbits and spread like locust. I will complain a lot about expanding and breeding desires below, and since it is vital to expand in order to gain more influence and power, you might be puzzled as to why it's so bad. Well, the thing is that if you are unlucky, villagers will want to expand until there is no more room on the entire island, not even for forests! And forests are life. Without them, you will die. A tip to keep easier track of all the villagers is to use the "S" key, as described in the manual, to activate small information bubbles above each villager. And note that villagers, although seemingly originating from primitive cultures, may live until they are well over eighty years old. Also understand that villagers have their own unique personalities and attributes. If you notice alot of people in your village "chilling out", you may have a problem. Put these villagers to work immediately, to prevent disillusion. Good diciples for these kind of villagers would be fishermen, foresters or traders, since they would have to walk alot, and not have time to sit down much. Do monitor the health of people who work far away from the village storage though, as lack of food and sleep will affect their well being. And be aware that breeding one lazy villager with another may produce an even lazier offspring. Now the manual fails to highlight alot of things about how demanding the villagers really are. In fact, there is a whole evil circle involved in managing villages. First of all, villagers will need food to survive. But too much food will induce a desire for breeding, and satisfying breeding will induce a desire for expanding from the offspring, which in turn will require wood and thus raise the desire for that. And after all the new villagers has new homes, they must feed again and so the food desire once again goes up. This, if not countered, will spiral your way towards your doom. The first problem you encounter is usually that your initial village has a maximum expansion desire. Now, to expand, you will need wood, and you can't just keep giving the villagers wood forever, since they will become disillusioned. You will need forests near your village, and a lot of them. Training your creature to water trees is a very good idea as a couple of disciple foresters in a village with a high forest desire can devour a huge forest in no time. Another problem with trees is that the stupid villagers cut down the smallest trees first, which won't yield as much wood and which will prevent the forest from growing at it's fastest rate. Always water the small trees to counter this! Also note that since the buildings you construct vary depending on the current needs of the villagers and the location your are trying to place it, you can sometimes get a better building by trying a couple of different places (this can be important with bigger houses, since they all cost two scaffolds, but house different amounts of villagers). The workshop is a very good target for the wood miracle, with no risk of disillusion, since the villagers won't deliver wood to it by themselves unless you assign disciple craftsmen to it (which you definetly should do). Construction sites are also equally good targets. This leads to the second problem. The villagers won't deliver food to your temple shrines no matter what you do! This is a vertiable management nightmare since the shrines are the source of your Prayer Energy. Temple shrines don't work like the village storage either. You cannot dump a large amount of food on a shrine and expect it to last. A large amount of food dumped in a shrine will last nearly exactly as long as a small amount of food. Instead, keep your deliveries regular and don't concentrate on the amount of food, but rather on whether the flag is up or not. The food desire flag on a shrine should NEVER even be visible! You can get the creature to deliver for you, but it can only carry small amounts initially so it's a rather ineffective use of your creature. Teach it to use the Food miracle instead and leash it do the food desire flag on a shrine. This way, the creature will automatically try to lower the flag using what it has learnt. Note that leashing the creature to the shrine altar won't accomplish Anything (except if you have an evil creature, in which case it may start Sacrificing villagers). Worshippers produce Prayer Energy by draining their own lives, so they will also need healing from time to time, or they will die at the site (even if the flag which indicates the need for sleep isn't visible at all). Next up is breeding. This is the worst thing that can happen, since when villagers decide they want to breed, it will affect all other desires too, as mentioned above. Breeding doesn't cost you anything to fix though, but the consequences of too much offspring will. Note that male breeders will impregnate more than one woman. A female breeder will only produce offspring once every 9 months (about one real minute). Select the gender of the breeder according to your expanding plans for your village and your current needs. Finally we have food. This is the least of the problems, yet it still is A problem, since even though you can have one field per ten villagers, a Couple of diciple fishermen and a good supply of grain coming into the storage regularly, if the storage isn't extremely well loaded, the villagers will complain. Food miracles cast on the storage by either you or your creature in addition to many fields will remedy the situation, though. But be careful, overfeeding will cause the desire to breed to increase, and you'll soon get worse problems than just disillusion on your hands. Civic building desire is the only thing which isn't a problem, since only three kinds exist, and after you've built them, the villagers will be satisfied. The créche, which keeps children in one location, can also serve another purpose. Usually, the kids just run around after their mothers until they grow up, but if you drop a couple of rocks outside the building there is a large chance that they will start dancing around them and make Artefacts out of them. The Artefacts can then be used to convert other villages by dumping them There instead (after they have started glowing and showing your symbol). A balance between expansion and breeding can be achieved though, but you Will probably sweat and swear a lot before you find it. One way to do it is to acommodate all needs but breeding. The villagers will then die without leaving any families behind, and houses will start to empty. When that happens, you can put a couple of breeders to work without having to expand or watch out for other increasing desires until the houses are filled up again. Check when the amount of children in the créche roughly matches the number of empty positions in your houses and convert all (or most) of the disciple breeders to something else then. Note that the amount of people the village can hold, as shown by the Totem will NOT be the same as the number of empty rooms in the houses. The houses only show how many adults they can house! The children capacity of a building can't be seen. Villagers can ask for more homes even if there seems to be enough space, since there can be a child who is homeless. Also, a building can be moved as long as the scaffold is visible. If you want to change the location of a building, damage is badly enough, and the scaffold will appear and be moveable again. Placing buildings too close can also have the effect that your creature won't be able to reach certain areas, since it can't fit between the houses! (Until it gets so large that it can walk over houses, that is.) Reduce or Enlarge Creature spells can temporarily counter the situation, though. Note that if you need help with a certain desire in the village, you can actually leash your creature to an individual desire flag, and it will try to assist in the best possible way it knows. Finally, the scroll in your Temple which contains village statistics only displays the total of all your villages. To see statistics like availible space and diciples for a single village, you will have to run around to every village the knock on houses and look at Totems yourself. 7. ISLAND SPECIFIC TIPS AND SECRETS Below I will try to give a general overview of the islands, with some strategy tips and some tips on how conquer each island. There will also be notes about gold scrolls and solutions to secret island quests (those without scrolls). Note that I will write the general tips first, and only dig into the secret stuff in the last couple of paragraphs, so there should be minimal spoilers on the first couple of lines on each island. 7.1 THE FIRST ISLAND *********************** BUG WARNING!*********************** After a while on island one, Whitey will always say that you killed someone! This happens when an Actor turned Vagrant Start dies (press "S" to see their titles). Usually, it is the Singing Stone guy who dies of old age after some time, but all the other Actors eventually die too if you wait long enough (except the Stone Cutter, it seems). Naturally, you shouldn't have to take the blame for this, so it's considered a bug for now. *********************************************************** Since this is the tutorial island, all the features of the game aren't accessible. But on the other hand, the demands placed on you here areExtremely low, so it is a very good place to hone your creature training skills and also teach the creature every miracle on the island. There is no time limit on how long you can stay here. But, there's also a drawback. Since not everything in the game can be accessed yet, you may not be able to teach your creature everything you want. You can, however, save the game and play a skirmish for awhile, and then load and take your creature back to the island with all it's new gained knowledge. You will have to do certain gold scroll quests in order to get a creature, but don't do the last one (the one the Guide creature warns you about) if you Want to hang out on the island. Note that no quest should be of any trouble here, since the camera will always zoom to show you any important places of the quest, and both Whitey and Blackie will give you hints and tips. Also, the best way to help the farmer woman is to simply drop the sick brother by her. Wrecking her house is evil, but you can do better than that! Kill the brother and then drop the corpse by her. Or even worse, trash the house, kill the sister and drop her corpse by him (he'll then die of shock). When you decide to activate the last gold scroll, make sure you stack up on one-shot miracles (by picking them off the dispensers and dropping them) and anything else you want to take with you, since you can drop it all in the vortex when it opens and it will be there on the next island. Remember to bring all your villagers too! Note that the natural way to complete the Ogre quest would be after the Piper quest, but if you do it the other way around, the improved miracle Dispenser you get as a reward will be given after the Piper instead. When you finally leave the island, make sure your creature is trained And ready to handle itself, since you may not have much time to spend with it on island two (the demands of the villagers there are bound to keep you busy for long periods of time). 7.2 THE SECOND ISLAND ****************** BUG WARNING! **************************** You can focus and feed (for example) other creatures than your own! This may be another of those very strange design decisions, but one I can't figure out at all. This also reveals an embarrassing fact about the enemy AI in the game: Creatures belonging to other gods have 100% hunger and thirst without collapsing! Also, the time (and thus distance) an AI god can reach out and act outside it's area of influence might also be questionable... ************************************************************ Note that the tutorial isn't quite over when you first arrive on island two. You still can't construct buildings yet, even though your villagers will want them. Be patient, though, since you will soon be taught how to. In the meantime, it would be wise to teach your creature how to water forests, since they are so scarce on this island that BOTH of the other gods will steal trees from you! Also, you are probably meant to learn how to micromanage villages on this island, since you absolutely have to! The stupid villagers won't lift a finger except for doing massive breeding and devastation of forests. In fact, the closest primaeval forest to the village will usually be devoured in a matter of minutes, and there is no way to get it back. Use the Water miracle on the surviving trees quickly, in order to regenerate as much trees as possible, and get your creature to help you! Also, once small trees pop up, target them instead of the larger trees and your forest will grow even faster. Once you do get a workshop and the ability to construct buildings, note that you will need to expand initially to get all the villagers from island one into houses. It is also alright to expand a bit further, since it will give you more power, but watch out so you don't run out of space to build new homes (it can happen, if you don't take control over their desires). If your expansion does get out of control, do everything in your power to keep forests growing, since without them you will be doomed. Also, when you have managed to house all the villagers you brought with you from the first island, you will get the knowledge of the Forest miracle. Because of all the lazy villagers on this island, you will have to keep a steady amount of diciples to get anything done. To be able to do this, you will need a good memory and a keen eye. Because, when a diciple dies, they won't transfer their knowledge over to their offspring, and thus, when you notice that the diciple count is dwindling on the scroll in your Temple, you must zoom around over every village to find out where it was that one of your diciples died. In order to be able to cast your own miracles and start using the Totem in your village center, activate the first couple of golden scroll as soon as possible. When you reach the right golden scroll (the one where you get taught how to use the gestures), Khazar will want to you impress a village. Note that you do not have to take over the village, you only have to impress them until the point where Khazar leaves. You can then go back to your first village again, and continue managing that until you feel comfortable with it. You do not have to worry so much about breeding initially in the first village, since the food levels will be low and you can keep them that way by constantly taking food from the storage to supply your temple shrines with (or divert the villagers to other duties instead). Khazar will also urge you to conquer Lethys' villages far too soon, in My opinion. Make sure your own villages are well balanced first! So, this is the first island where you have to take over other villages. Depending on whether you are playing good or evil, choose your desired method of converting the other villages, but it won't require much belief on this island... it's harder to keep them satisfied (if you are evil, you only need to keep them, which is easier). However, there is a hidden quest near Lethys' first village. It's a tree puzzle, which will grant you a Flying Creatures miracle dispenser if it's solved, which in turn will make it much easier to impress the village. (To solve the puzzle, note that each moved tree changes all trees around it. So, work your way around the edges and have it so your last move it to change the middle tree.) Note the amount of lazy people in the village closest to your first one. When you take over that village, deal with them in a way you feel is appropriate. There is also an unclaimed Greek village near Khazar's realm, where there Will be a person sacrificing children in order to keep the villagers constantly youthfull. He will curse if you pick him up, and if you do kill him, all the people in that village will die. Once you take over the first village from the enemy god, Lethys, you are on your own. Lethys will rarely attack you, though, he will mainly cast protection on his own villages if you try to convert them. He will, however attack your creature with his arsenal of miracles if it gets too near a village of his. Make sure your creature can both cast Water AND Heal on itself (this may actually have to be taught during an attack). Also note that you cannot damage or destroy his temple until ALL of his villages are either neutral or under your control. And for disposing temples, throwing flaming boulders (heated with fireballs) are very effective. Casting a Teleport miracle outside far away villages and next to your Temple is also a very good idea, to save people the long walk to and from the worship sites (especially during the time that they are being built). 7.3 THE THIRD ISLAND ******************* BUG WARNING! *************************** Some people have complained about huge saving and loading times when They reach the third island (or play a very long skirmish game). Well, hopefully this will be optimised in a patch by Lionhead, but in the meantime, if you have an additional 200mb of disk space, copy the Audio folder from the CD to it's corresponding folder on your hard drive. Note that you do this on your own risk! There is no guarantee that your game will work 100% after doing this. ************************************************************ This island is a bit trickier, since it requires a lot of belief to convert villages, and they are quite far apart. Your initial area of influence is also rather small, but it will as usual grow with more belief. The main problem here seems to be a pack of wolves which attacks your second village. There are, however, several method of disposing them. Lightning and fire miracles work if you want to target practice. You can also set fire to the forest they run through, if you aim carefully. This will take care of most of the wolves. But you can also use your godly powers to freeze time (ehm... "pause" that is) and pick each wolf up and use it for food for villagers by dropping them in a village storage. (Alt+1 and Alt+2 also works for slowing or speeding up the game.) Also, don't underestimate your enemy, even though he is down to his last village. He will sacrifice everything in sight to get Prayer Energy! 7.4 THE FOURTH ISLAND ----------------------- IMPORTANT NOTICE! ------------------ I personally haven't got this far in the game since I want to find out everything there is about the other islands first, so this section is purely made out of contributions and small information nuggets I dug out of forums. ------------------------------------------------------------ The fourth island is actually the first island, but everything has been shot to hell. Nemesis cursed the land with thunder storms, fireballs and a blood red sky. All is guarded by three Gardian Stones, each one assigned to power one of the island's curses. The most imposing problem here is that you are being bombarded by fireballs. Note that these can be temporarily avoided using shields around your village or by catching them (one tactic is to catch a fireball in your hand and then simply absorb any other incoming ones). Note that shields require alot of Prayer Energy to stay up (if you run out, they will dissapear, just as the Forest miracle), but there is a Spiritual Shield miracle dispenser near your Temple. These one-shot miracles can also be activated, and then shaken off in order to transfer their inherent power to your Temple instead! To stop the fireballs permanently, you need to solve a puzzle. This puzzle must be unlocked by conquering one of the villages first (it's the Japanese village next to the Gardian Stone with the physical and spiritual shield around it). A good tactic here is to bring a couple of Artefacts from previous islands to drop in the village for a good amount of belief. The bell puzzle itself is very simple and it's always the same one so even if you fail the first few times, you can always try again. After that, you probably want to stop the thunder storms. That stone is Guarded by the ogre named Sleg (remember him?) and this time, a fight is unavoidable. Defeat him and the thunder storms will stop. The last thing to fix is the blood red sky. You have to bring a woman to a Nemesis believer named Adam. The woman is named Keiko (although it will only say Actor if you press "S") and is his wife. Nemesis said that she would die if her husband would stop beleiving in him, though you can also kill her to solve the quest. Regarding the cursed village with the Skeleton tribe, you need to raise The buried village Totems (yes, there are two of them) to their full height. To do this, you need extend your area of influence over the village and have your creature raise one of the Totems AT THE SAME TIME as you raise the other! If your creature knows how to use Totems, this shouldn't be too hard. Note that the Skeleton tribe will die out cause of old age, which may (or may not) seem strange, but it does not make any difference in completing the quest. 7.5 THE FIFTH ISLAND ******************** BUG WARNING! ************************** Many people have reported this bug: If you complete the game, the curse On your creature will still be in effect and there is no way to make it go away! Your creature's alignment will reverse and it will constantly shrink in all network, internet and skirmish games afterwards! Until the issue has been cleared or a patch is out, I recommend people NOT to venture into the fifth island! Play skirmish or on the internet and train your creature in the meantime. ************************************************************ 8. SILVER SCROLL SOLUTIONS The silver scrolls are the mini-quests of Black & White. They're not essential to finishing the game, but they may grant rewards if they are solved properly. Most quests have good and evil solutions to them. Below, both ways and their rewards will be described as detailed as possible. Note that I write more or less abstract tips in the first couple of paragraphs, and then I become increasingly detailed in my descriptions. This is to reduce spoilers for those who just want some basic tips. Some of the scrolls must also be activated before they show up on the islands. The triggers for these are usually when you take over a certain village or when you reach a certain point on an island, so they are not worth mentioning here. 8.1 QUESTS ON THE FIRST ISLAND The first island is the tutorial island, and thus, it's quests don't have time limits and you get very good tips on how to complete them. Miracle dispensers are the most common reward here. 8.1.1 THROWING STONES Location: Near the mountain, next to the shore near your temple. Good Solution ------------- Do as Whitey and Blackie suggests and throw a bunch of stones at the rock lying on top of the pillar. Just watch out so you don't hit the house which lies in the same area, or it's inhabitant for that matter. If you are lucky, having your creature leashed to you with the Learning Rope while trying to score a hit might actually learn him how to throw stones into the water or on land and trees, which will make it grow stronger. Note that on other islands, stones won't be limitless as in this quest, so it might be a good idea to return the stones to their original position, and hope the creature copies this course of action too. There is also a secret to this quest! If you keep throwing stones on the pillar, it will drop Water mircales. You can keep this up for some time before it stops (note that the limitless stone supply will end once you started doing other qusts). Good Reward: Chest with a Beach Ball (and secret one-shot Water miracles). Evil Solution ************* You can, of course, have your creature leashed to you with the aggressive leash too. In that case, when you throw stones at the pillar, the creature will more likely aim at the house, it's inhabitant or at some trees. If you do destroy the hut, you can rebuild it to get a rather hefty belief award. Naturally, throwing villagers to try to knock the stone off the pillar will also work. Evil Reward: Chest with a Beach Ball (and secret one-shot Water miracles). 8.1.2 THE SAVIOR Location: By the shore with the fishing spots near your temple. Good Solution ------------- Simply do as Whitey says and have your creature pick them up. This is easily accomplished by leashing it with the compassion leash and action clicking on the drowning men. When the creature has reached the men and picked one up, quickly click on the beach next to the woman who gave you the quest. Hopefully, your creature will drop the fisherman and wait. If you have an inexperienced creature, the danger here is that he will either throw or eat the fishermen if you take too long time between the pickup and destination drop commands. Good Reward: Creature Strength miracle dispenser. Evil Solution ************* Letting them drown, or even throwing in the farmer woman who gave you The quest is are sure evil way of finishing off this task. The fishermen will Also be excellent food for your creature. Evil Reward: Creature Strength miracle dispenser. 8.1.3 THE LOST FLOCK Location: In the village near the créche. Good Solution ------------- This is the first tricky quest in the game. In order to return the sheep To the farmer, you have to find them. This isn't easy at first, since they are very small, and you have to look closely to the ground to spot them. However, you can also listen carefully when you search the land. When you are close to a sheep, you will hear it, sometimes before you see it. The farmer requires five sheep, but there are more than that on the island... And if you do return all the sheep, he will reward you by letting you select a Sheep as your own creature! The locations of all the sheep are the following: * Next to the stone sculptor's house. * Behind the huge gate. * Fenced in with some pigs in a farm outside the village. * On a mountaintop, close to the hermit. * Amongst some trees, close to the hermit (where the sick man was). * Near a singing stone by the sea, close to the fishing spots. * By the pillar where you practice stone throwing. * Under some palm trees next to the beach where you started. * On the mountainside near the palm trees where you started. Good Reward: Stack of Food (and the Sheep creature if you return ALL sheep!) Evil Solution ************* Kill the sheep, feed them to your creature, kill the farmer, wreck his house... Use your sinister little imagination. Evil Reward: Nothing! 8.1.4 THE SINGING STONES (1) Location: Near the shore outside the second village. Good Solution ------------- Not only will you need to find the singing stones here, but you will need To find the CORRECT stones and place them in the right order. (The singing stones are the teardrop shaped rocks with a rune on.) The right order is simply a musical scale, going from the lower tones to The higher. Action click the a singing stone to hear it's tone, and then Place it on one of the dark spots to have it to join in the playing of the scale with the other stones. You can pick up and rearrange any of the stones you find, but note that The three stones which are already in place cannot be moved, but also doesn't need to, since they already are in the right spot. There also exists three false stones on the island. They are recognized By their low pitch tones, which doesn't belong to the scale. The locations for the correct stones are the following: * Next to the circle of the singing stones. * Behind the graveyard in the village. * In the hermit's quarry. * Amongst some trees, close to the hermit (where the sick man was). * In the mountain backside, close to the starting beach. Good Reward: Food micracle dispenser. Evil Solution ************* Well, I don't know if the stones can be destroyed, and not doing anything In this case won't complete the quest. I guess you could try to destroy the hut of the caretaker of the stones, if you feel that it will accomplish something. Evil Reward: Nothing! 8.1.5 THE EXPLORERS Location: By the shore behind the huge gates. Good Solution ------------- First of all, it has been said that taking food out of a village storage may be an evil act, but for this mission, it seems to be overlooked. Whitey's comment upon completing the quest might also imply that he wanted them to stay (he says that he "hates goodbyes"...) but it's the only way to get rewarded in this quest. So, you need to supply them with what they want. Trees will do you no good, as they need "prepared wood". This has to be taken from the storage or from any stack of wood. Next, they want grain. A field or storage will provide that. Note that it may be evil to take food from villagers and use it on anything outside the village. If you don't want to risk that, use fish instead, since fish transforms into grain when you pick it up. Finally, they need meat. There are several options for the meat, but if you drop a sheep by them, they will say that it has "a lot of uses", which the don't say if you drop any other animal. Note that I have had several kinky references to syphilis on that above Sheep comment. Has nobody considered the fact that you get wool from a sheep? Just make sure you have completed the sheep farmer's quest before you give away a sheep, or you won't be able to finish it perfectly. A cow is a good substitute for a sheep. You can also drop a woman by them when they ask for "meat". Since it sounds like they have good intentions, I believe this is a good bonus. You can also give them additional men as crew or a child for scrubbing the decks. (If you accidently kill one of them, you can also drop a male villager by them to replace the dead crewmember.) Being kind to the emigrants will also let you help them on island five, where you will receive an extra village and the Polar Bear creature if you help them again. Good Reward: Water miracle dispenser. Evil Solution ************* Since you will have no means of torching the ship when you get this quest, the only evil option left is to kill the sailors. Evil Reward: Nothing! (Except for a comic scene after the killing.) 8.1.6 THE PIED PIPER Location: By the village créche and the cave in the mountain beside it. Good Solution ------------- As Whitey says, the key to rescuing the children alive is to somehow get The piper to release them. Since you can't reach into the cave, and not even pick up the piper, you'll have to try another way. The solution lies with your creature. However, the creature won't be fast enough to catch him either. So, the only option left is to leash the creature to the piper. The piper will panic and freeze, so your creature can calmly catch up with him and pick him up. Though make sure you are using the compassion leash, or chances are that the creature will either throw or eat the piper, which is very bad. Now all you have to do is to drop the piper in front of the cave (action click in front of the opening) and he'll release the children and become a good villager again. Good Reward: Heal miracle dispenser. Evil Solution ************* Since you don't care about the echo of crying sounds from the cave, naturally the piper must die. Have your creature eat him, throw him into the sea or drop a stone on him to finish off this quest. Evil Reward: Lightning miracle dispenser. 8.1.7 THE HERMIT Location: In the mountains by the starting location. Good Solution ------------- The easiest way to complete this quest is simply to let your creature grow over time and return just before you leave the island to see if it has gotten large enough. If you are lucky and find an Enlarge Creature one-shot miracle you can also use this to impress the Hermit, although the locations of these are totally randomized. Another trickier way is to carefully watch which tree the Hermit uses to measure the height of the creature with, and then replace it with a smaller shrubbery. The last solution above does not always work, it seems. But to increase it's chance of success, return with your creature to the Hermit until he stops talking to you. Then remove every tree around the house (water the area to make sure that every tree is gone) and replace a few with shrubberies. When you return with your creature to the Hermit after this, chances are that he will be impressed. Good Reward: Water miracle dispenser (and a tip on fireflies). Evil Solution ************* Now that's a rather large and luxurious hut for such a despickable hermit, isn't it? And what is the worst thing one could do to a hermit, I wonder? Well, have your creature try to impress by carefully aiming a boulder on the building and watch the hermit's reaction. Watch out, though. The hermit will try to return the favour by sneaking into your village and set fire to your village storage. Having the creature throw the Hermit into the sea might impress you, but I'm not so sure about the Hermit... Whitey isn't impressed, though. Evil Reward: Chest with a one-shot Water miracle. 8.1.8 THE OGRE Location: Valley outside the second village. Good Solution ------------- Whitey obviously has a point with the ogre being hungry. You can try to drop food by him, but since he's outside your area of influence you'll have to be extremely quick before your power drains. Another way of getting him food is to have your creature wear the compassion leash and bring him food. However, the ogre is an aggressive creature, so keep your distance and run away as soon as your crature has dropped the food. Once properly fed (you'll have to feed it twice) the ogre will fall asleep and you can sneak past with your creature and claim your reward. Good Reward: Beach Ball and an improved power Healing miracle dispenser. Evil Solution ************* Blackie, of course, suggests a fight. Just have your creature approach the ogre with the leash of aggression and battle it out! It shouldn't be hard to slay the ogre. But if you do fail, and loose the battle, don't worry, since you can try again as many times as you like. Evil Reward: Beach Ball and an improved power Healing miracle dispenser. 8.1.9 MUSHROOM COOKING QUEST (1) Location: Forest covered peak by the shore near the circle of Singing Stones. Note that this quest REQUIRES an enabled force feedback mouse in order To appear in the game!!! Good Solution ------------- Feel your way around the circle of mushrooms in order to find the right one (the one which shakes the most). It should be the third one from the left of the biggest stone. Just put in in the cualdron to complete the quest. Good Reward: Loving Creature miracle dispenser. Evil Solution ************* Well, choose a bad mushroom and the little hut will explode! Evil Reward: Nothing! 8.2 QUESTS ON THE SECOND ISLAND The second island is a bit larger than the first, and the quests come a bit further away here. The rewards also vary a bit, as does their solutions. 8.2.1 THE PLAGUE Location: Indian village in the middle of the island. Good Solution ------------- Now this is tricky, morally that is. Running around healing villagers won't do much. The disease will spread anyway. You need to find the source of the problem. It is quite easy to spot, however. All the food in the storage green and spoiled. Healing the food doesn't seem to help, so the only way it to drain the entire storage from grain... which is stealing from the villagers, and evil. Throw the grain in the water to get rid of it and quickly try to replace The food to silence the cries from the villagers. Then quickly heal all of them before more people die, and the quest will be complete. Good Reward: Lightning Bolt miracle at the village center. Evil Solution ************* If you are truly nasty, you will convert all your villagers to farmers and farm the hell out of the village until every last one of them has died. What you are left with is a very effective weapon against enemy villages (or even enemy creatures). Just throw some of the spoiled food near enemy villages and watch the naive people eat, suffer and die! If you gathered enough food, you can empty all of the villages on the entire island, since the other gods will have no idea of what you are doing. Evil Reward: Nothing! (Well... except some cool means of chemical warfare...) 8.2.2 THE SACRIFICE Location: Third Indian village, next to the Singing Stones. Good Solution ------------- This quest is meant to teach you about sacrificing. Whitey is absolutely right. A good god does not sacrifice living creatures. But a sacrifice is still needed to complete this quest. The simplest thing to do is just to sacrifice trees (or a shrubbery!) Until you reach the same amount of prayer power as sacrificing his first born son would yield. Good Reward: Increased power Heal from the village center. Evil Solution ************* Well, dinner is served, so to speak. Start out lightly, with the first born son, then move on to his wife and to round off, sacrifice the Shaman Himself for some serious poetic justice. Evil Reward: ??? 8.2.3 THE SEA Location: Indian village in the middle of the island. Good Solution ------------- Well, since the children are being naughty, they refuse come out of the water. Of course, as in the drowning fishermen quest, the creature can remedy the situation, and bring the kids back to their mother (or just pick them up yourself). Note that bringing the mother to the kids, although an amusing way to complete the quest, won't yield any reward. Good Reward: Enlarge Creature miracle dispenser. Evil Solution ************* Again, the creature can help here too. Chances are that, by now, it will know what to do with food which has strayed too long from the village... But if you want to be even more cruel, have the children witness the death of their mother. After which, of course, they can become creature snack too, if you want. Evil Reward: ??? 8.2.4 THE SINGING STONES (2) Location: Next to a mountain by the village near the center of the island. Note that all the tunes have to be played in order to fully complete the quest! Good Solution ------------- If you have a musical ear, this quest might be easy. If not, it's rather hard. The stones are arranged in a scale, and this time you need to get them to play certain melodies by action clicking them in the right order. A clue to the first melody can be found in the Indian village nearby, where there is a piper who whistles a well known French traditional folk song named "Ah! vous dirai-je maman"... Though the song may be more commonly recognized as "Twinkle, twinkle Little star". The correct notes for the tune are the following (ordered left to right): 1, 1, 8, 8, 9, 9, 8, 6, 6, 5, 5, 3, 3, 1 1, 1, 8, 8, 9, 9, 8, 5, 5, 3, 3, 2, 2, 1 (alt. version) The day will the turn into night and the stones will change into gravestones. As for the second, good tune, you have to ponder a bit. Now, what is the game called again? And you are playing good. So the other tune would be... I wonder if they do celebrate Christmas on these islands? And yes, the correct piece of music is "White Christmas" by Irving Berlin. The correct notes for the last tune are the following (ordered left to right): 2, 3, 2, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 5, 6, 5, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 (alt. version) After this tune has been played, snow will start falling on the landscape. Note that the evil song has to be played in order to fully complete this quest, and that the Silver Scroll will stay even after completition (probably because you can play the tunes over and over again). Good Reward: ??? Evil Solution ************* The same activation tune as for the good way is in fact required for the evil way too. The clue to the second tune can be found by searching the shores behind the huge mountains beyond the centre of the island (not the snowy ones) where there is a piper whistling on something. More exactly, the correct piece of music is Chopin's "Marche funébre: Lento" or piano sonata No. 2, B flat minor, Op. 35, third movement. More commonly referred to as the "Funeral march". The correct notes for this tune are the following (ordered left to right): 2, 2, 2, 2, 5, 4, 4, 2, 2, 1, 2 5, 5, 5, 5, 8, 7, 7, 5, 5, 4, 5 (alt. version) You will get a magical ring where you can ressurect dead beings in, which Will disappear after awhile, but just play the tune again to power it up. Evil Reward: A magical ring where you can ressurect dead beings. 8.2.5 THE BEACH TEMPLE PUZZLE Location: Shore near the the lake in the middle of the island. Good Solution ------------- This is a simpler version of the classical towers of Hanoi puzzle. It is simpler, since you only have 3 pillars to act upon here. Just move the smallest top to the middle, the middle top to the far right, then place the smallest one far right, and move the base from the left to the middle. Repeat the procedure with the two smaller pieces, but move them to the far left this time. The biggest base can then be moved to the right, which is the correct position for it. Finally, lift the smallest piece to the middle, put the middle piece on the base to the right and finish off with the smallest piece and voila! Note that the priest will complain about his belonging being wrecked While you move the temple, so completing the quests with the minimal possible moves would be desired. You should only have to move the base twice. Good Reward: Temple will cast increased power Heal on anyone near it. Evil Solution ************* ----------------- REQUEST FOR INFORMATION! ----------------- Has anyone tried torching the temple of wrecking it with stones? Any mails on a possible evil solution to this quest will be welcome. Thanks go out in advance. ------------------------------------------------------------ Moving the poor priest's home until every belonging inside it is totally trashed is probably rather evil (or just dumb). Note that you cannot throw the temple pieces anywhere, since they only Stick to the pillars. Evil Reward: ??? 8.2.6 THE GREEDY FARMER *************** BUG WARNING! ****************************** The script for this quest will start running even before you have activated the Silver Scroll! If you take too long time you may not be able to finish this quest and get a reward. ************************************************************ Location: First Celtic village in the snowy mountains. Good Solution ------------- If the children are already on their way with a cow, you can pick it up and put it back with it's herd to get a small compliment from Whitey. The children won't give up because of this minor setback, though. -------------------- INCOMPLETE SOLUTION! ------------------ It seems that this quest cannot be completed without one of the children dying! Has anyone for sure completed this quest with ALL kids alive? Thanks go out in advance, since I usually never have time to reply. Sorry. ------------------------------------------------------------ Good Reward: Nothing! Evil Solution ************* Finally a mission where you can go postal and still succeed. Throw, burn, rain lightning or feed one of the kids to your creature to discourage the other kids from continuing to steal cows. Though Blackie will dig you, the farmer won't even say thanks, so there is no reward for child murder here. But, the other way around, of course, would be to kill the farmer instead. Evil Reward: Increased power Lightning Bolt from the village center. 8.2.7 THE IDOL Location: Outside second village on a mountain path by the shore. Good Solution ------------- The idol clearly has to go. The question is how to do it. Throwing rocks at it won't do much, it's stronger than that... Lightning just electrifies it a bit too, it doesn't do any damage. However, it is vulnerable to fire. To set it on fire, place someting Flammable next to it and have a fireball thrown in it's direction. The heat from the flammable object will help getting the Idol red glowing hot, until it finally shatters. The people praying at the idol will then realize who is the more powerfull God and place their faith in you instead. Whitey will also dig the fact that you didn't kill anyone by the shrine. Good Reward: Increased power Fireball miracle at the village center. Evil Solution ************* As Blackie so enthusiastically proclaims, the life expectancy of anyone daring to pray at the idol would be rather weak. Apply your favourite method of destruction to anyone near the idol. Note that you also have to destroy the idol in order to get the reward, as in the good solution of this quest. Evil Reward: Increased power Fireball miracle at the village center. 8.2.8 THE SLAVERS Location: Second Greek village beyond the lake in the centre of the island. Good Solution ------------- Here you need to free the villagers which has been taken for slaves by supplying the circus with some rare animals for replacement. There are a total of 8 slaves you can free and you can only deliver two types of each animal to trade. There are, however, a number of animals you can try: * Lion, 2 slaves each (mountains next to the circus) * Tiger, 2 slaves each (outside the first Greek village) * Wolf, 2 slaves each (forest near Indian village beyond the Beach Temple) * Horse, 1 slave each (middle of the island) * Turtle, 1 slave each (islands outside your Temple) Note that Cows and Sheep will be zapped if you try to give them to the circus. Also, the slavers don't like you stealing from them. Be warned and beware. Good Reward: Flock of Wolves miracle dispenser. Evil Solution ************* Be warned, this quest is dangerous to finish in an evil way, and won't grant you any rewards. If you kill one of the circus men, the others will declare war upon you and run down to your village and zap villagers! You have to make sure you kill all six of them fast if you do not want this to happen. Evil Reward: Nothing! 8.2.9 THE RIDDLES Location: Tiny Indian village near the lake in the middle of the island. Good Solution ------------- The answers to the riddles are really simple, but do double check that everything really is there if you can't seem to get the reward (remember that you can deactivate and then reactivate the shield at will). Something which howls is a wolf (found in forest next to the village). The simplest thing which is hot is a heated rock (heated with a Fireball). That which is unique to your creature is poop (but any creature poop will work). Good Reward: The Zebra Creature. Evil Solution ************* Yes, you can trash her house and behave in a generally destructive manner, if that pleases you, but the woman will refuse to talk to you and you won't be able to solve the quest. Evil Reward: Nothing! 9. GENERAL QUESTIONS Well, since this is a FAQ, I'll try to answer some of the most common questions here. If you want an answer to a question which isn't listed here, not anywhere else in the FAQ, mail me about it. I won't however, mail you back with an answer. If the question was good, it will appear here. 9.1 WHERE CAN I FIND EASTER EGGS IN THE GAME? There is a mind boggling amount of Easter eggs in Black & White. I guess that they have accumulated over the three years it took Lionhead to complete the game (but one has to wonder if the time spent programming eggs couldn't have been used to tweak other factors of gameplay instead). So far, the Easter eggs which have been found are the following: * Moving the mouse during the particle animation with the Lionhead logo will cause the particles to scatter. Using a mousewheel you can also speed up or slow down the animation. * The particle animation Lionhead logo will sometimes change into one of your symbols instead, with your profile name under it. * The game will sometimes speak out your name. The game actually has a database of names it can say, and it's suspected that it gets your name from registering the software online. * In the créche on the first island, first village, there are a couple of dice and a teddy bear (this is the reason why the creature is so interested in that building). * The emigrants with the ark has a Southpark reference if you kill one of them. You can also notice a scene from Titanic when the ark sails away. * On the backside of a small island in the playroom of the gods, there are a number of bowling balls and some skittles. * You can find dice and a beach ball if you look under rocks in the playroom of the gods. * When you hold your hand over some of the pillars of stone on the islands you'll get messages telling you to stop bothering the help function. * On April 1st, all the footprints in the game will be smiley faces. * A number of Lionhead employees appear as villagers in the game. * If you don't do anything for a period of time, Blackie and Whitey will start pulling jokes on each other. * Blackie will ask if they will appear in the sequel... * Blackie does several Southpark impressions. * There is a phone conversation somewhere in the game where Peter Molyneux discusses a secret gesture in the game with an unknown person. * The secret gesture resembles the Fireball gesture, and has to be done after the leash gesture. A red telephone box will then appear on the north tip of the first island. The cheat associated with this egg appears to have been removed, though. And though it may not really strictly be an Easter egg, the fact that Your creature will produce it's own homepage with it's favourite photos in your profile folder is pretty darn nifty. 9.2 HOW DOES ONE USE MIRACLE DISPENSERS? >From the readme.txt: Miracle Dispensers - You are able to build your own one-shot Miracle Dispensers by combining six scaffolds created at your workshop. Once Placed on the landscape, you can create one-shot Miracles by charging a Miracle in your hand and casting it on the Dispenser. These can be moved from the Dispenser, placed anywhere and saved for later use. You can cast any Miracle on a created Dispenser to create a one-shot Miracle of that type. This is an especially useful tactic, as you can create one shot Mega-blasts and place them in the Vortex for use in later lands. --- Note that if you position four scaffolds for a field in an area where The field won't fit, it will sometimes turn into a miracle dispenser instead! Oh, and if you activate any one-shot miracle, and then shake it off, it's power will go into your accumulated Prayer Energy pool instead. It's great if you're out of power and need a quick boost. 9.3 WHAT MAKES THE CREATURE GROW FASTER? Well, everything makes the creature grow, really... remember that it is only 1 year old when you get it, and everything grows with age, including the creature. A signpost says that resting (not sleeping, mind you) will make the creature grow faster. It's quite easy to get it to rest, just get it to try to pick up an impossibly large boulder, and it will consider itself to have nothing to do and sit down. It's also said that the creature will grow faster when it is in it's pen, so just teach it to sleep there when it's tired. Note that resting the creature too much will make it move slower if it doesn't get regular exercise. Alignment has nothing to do with the amount a creature grows in size. An evil creature will get as large as a good natured creature. If your creature collapses due to damange, hunger or tiredness, it will take a small hit in size. 9.4 HOW DOES ONE UNLOCK ALL THE CREATURES? ******************** BUG WARNING! ************************** Until somebody mails me with proof of that they have completed the Wolf creature quest on island four, I will label that quest as having a script bug! There simply doesn't seem to be a way to complete the quest without having the woman say that she has run out of potions when she reaches her brother. ************************************************************ Note that four of the creatures require a downloaded patch to unlock: The Leopard, the Horse, the Mandrill and the Gorilla. I believe http://www.planetblackandwhite.com is a good location to get these. The Rhino patch hasn't been released yet. The Ogre IS included as a creature in the game (you can hack your Creature profile to get it, but don't ask me how... it's the "greek" creature anyhow). The Croc creature was supposedly removed from the game (there aren't any files for it included in the game anyway). Also note that you can only change those creatures on two locations in The game: On island one and island four. Make a save by one of these locations so you can load and change your creature at will. The other creatures has to be found by doing certain secret quests... (For details on these, look to the silver scroll quest solution area). The first island: * Sheep (return all 10 sheep to the farmer). The second island: * Zebra (place poop, heated rock and a wolf in ring and cast shield). The third island: * Chimp (bringing the witch a child when she gets dizzy). The fourth island: * Turtle (help boy catch two full schools of fish). * Wolf (escort woman to her brother in the Aztec village). The fifth island: * Lion (guide the wolf to the sheep). * Brown Bear (cleaning up the forest of poop). * Polar Bear (help the emigrants a second time). 9.5 HOW CAN I BACKUP MY CREATURE? I did not want to print this information at first, since it could be considered cheating, but then I remembered that Black & White is so far only availible for Windows, which you NEED to reinstall from time to time to prevent it from collecting too much crap in it's folders which slows down your system (and if you reinstall Windows, you have to reinstall everything else too... which is also crappy). So, here is the way to properly backup your creature, straight from the Lionhead Studios tech guys: To backup your Creature, make copies of these two folders to another directory : Program Files / Lionhead Studios Ltd / Black & White / profiles Program Files / Lionhead Studios Ltd / Black & White / scripts/ creaturemind Run the regedit program. Start Menu / Run / regedit Find (Ctrl + F) the folder called LHMultiplayer. Select this folder and Then using Registry on the toolbar menu, 'Export Registry File' as lhbackup. This will save a file wherever you choose as lhbackup.reg This saves your creature in his current state. In order to restore this creature backup, copy your backup folders /profiles & /scripts /creaturemind over the original files. Double click The registry backup file you created : lhbackup.reg to complete your Creature restoration. This restores the game including saves to the point where you backed your creature up. 10. FINAL NOTES The author of this FAQ is responsible for another FAQ for a similar game. That game is Alternate Reality: The Dungeon. The Dungeon also featured An extremely complex alignment system, with the game monitoring and remembering your every action. The Dungeon could also be completed either by being good or evil, and everyone you encountered in the game reacted on your current alignment. But not only could you be good or evil, you could also be labeled as a jerk, which wasn't really evil, just stupid. Alternate Reality: The Dungeon is a Computer Role Playing Game for the Atari 8-bit computers. It was released in 1985 and featured (for it's time) a state of the art 3d engine with mip-mapped textures, which didn't see equal until over 10 years later with the release of Wolfenstein 3D. Check it out at: http://user.tninet.se/~lan318o/alternate-reality/ 11. CREDITS Peter Molyneux for inventing the god genre and finally releasing this game. Lionhead Studios for promising a BeOS version, and then withdrawing it. Electronic Arts for managing to destroy almost every game company it touches. Also thanks to all the people who informed me of various evil ways to Complete the different quests! Thanks also go out to all the other people who contributed to this FAQ: Aaron Chen, EazyMo, David Edwards, Christopher Neil Evensen, Mitchell Gassner, Oz, Knighted, LintFiend, Alexander Sanford, VortexZ, Mist Wraith. Special thanks to Tomas Laland Ekeli for making this a better and more correct FAQ. Finally, thanks to everyone who posted tips on t he forums (anonymously or otherwise) and anyone else I might have forgotten to mention here. ------------------------------- THE END --------------------


text:
Apps For Turning Tweets Into Music
By Eliot Van Buskirk of Evolver.fm.
When you put words on Twitter, those words become data. Twitter has an API. You know what would be cool? To turn that data into music. Why not? To be clear, these apps are not for discovering music through Twitter (been there, done that). They actually incorporate Twitter — as in actual tweets — into music.
Tweet Concréte
Here is the sound of smartphones replacing PCs, as tweeted by @evolverfm.
How did we do that? With Tweet Concréte, an amusingly serious web app from Devin "FieldGuider," Ryan Fitzpatrick, and rcoppola, who built it at Music Hack Day SF 2013. Enter a Twitter name and you'll hear what a random "tweet" sounds like, translated into Music Concréte, a genre of music that involves found sound collage.
Designed to "generate short sound collages based on tweets," the app purports to let you "hear a tweet." We're not sure how it works, and in this case, we don't want (or need) to know, because the whole fun of it is watching your brain try to associate the audio with the text.
It works; the magic is largely between your ears.
Another fun entry in this relatively new canon is Nightingale, from Vivek Agrawal, who's also responsible for Playground.fm.
Also a product of Music Hack Day SF (Twitter is, after all, in San Francisco), this web app "crawls through your Twitter stream and matches keywords and phrases to song lyrics by utilizing text processing and sentiment analysis," according to the description. "After some serious data crunching, Nightingale delivers an amazing playlist that represents your life on Twitter in a musical way."
Basically, it mines Twitter for your mood and words, finds those words in song lyrics, does some other stuff, and spits the whole thing out as a Spotify playlist.
The Evolver.fm Twitter feed consists largely of headlines and links. Here's what it sounds like after being translated into a playlist by Nightingale:
Social Radio for Twitter (iOS)
We're bending the rules a little by including Social Radio for Twitter here, because it doesn't turn tweets into actual music. It does mix tweets in between songs on your own personalized radio stations, which is cool enough to qualify for this list. In essence, it turns Twitter into a music service that only plays songs you like and lets you hear tweets, say, while you're driving.
Install this iOS app, which was free "for a limited time" when we wrote about it last March, and is also free today, and you'll be able to listen to text-to-speech versions of your Twitter timeline, or "lists, trending topics, funny hashtags, news and searches." In addition to giving you all of that control (so you don't have to listen to, like, all of Twitter in a robot voice), the app mixes that into music from your iPhone, Spotify, Pandora, Last.fm, SoundCloud, or TuneIn. This is what we're talking about.
Honorable Mention: The Listening Machine
A publicly-funded project from The Space in the UK, The Listening Machine watched the Twitter feeds of 500 people from a variety of fields, and meticulously turned them into music. It was complicated, gathering data from the sentiment and frequency of the tweets, their topics, and even phonemes and rhythms from their words, translated into individual notes and beats.
It's like having a poet scan text, explain it to a musician, and then write music, based on the writings of 500 people — not a bad idea. But why would elected government officials (we assume) choose to fund something like this using money from the national Lottery system, as cool as it is? Wouldn't someone eventually complain?
Maybe that's why The Listening Machine, as ambitious as it was, is no longer operational.
(Image courtesy of Flickr/Sean Campbell)

subset: commoncrawl


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In the construction of any future dam, steam plant, or other facility, to be used in whole or in part for the generation or transmission of electric power the Board is authorized and empowered to issue on the credit of the United States and to sell serial bonds not exceeding $50,000,000 in amount, having a maturity not more than fifty years from the date of issue thereof, and bearing interest not exceeding 3½ per centum per annum. Said bonds shall be issued and sold in amounts and prices approved by the Secretary of the Treasury, but all such bonds as may be so issued and sold shall have equal rank. None of said bonds shall be sold below par, and no fee, commission, or compensation whatever shall be paid to any person, firm, or corporation for handling, negotiating the sale, or selling the said bonds. All of such bonds so issued and sold shall have all the rights and privileges accorded by law to Panama Canal bonds, authorized by section 8 of the Act of June 28, 1902, chapter 1302, as amended by the Act of December 21, 1905 (ch. 3, sec. 1, 34 Stat. 5). All funds derived from the sale of such bonds shall be paid over to the Corporation.
16 U.S. Code § 831n - Bonds for future construction; amount, terms, and conditions
Section 8 of the Act of June 28, 1902, chapter 1302, as amended by the Act of December 21, 1905 (ch. 3, sec. 1, 34 Stat. 5), referred to in text, was classified to sections 743, 744, and 744 note of former Title 31 and was repealed in part by Pub. L. 97–258, § 5(b), Sept. 13, 1982, 96 Stat. 1068, the first section of which enacted Title 31, Money and Finance, and in part by Pub. L. 97–452, § 4(b), Jan. 12, 1983, 96 Stat. 2480.
2004—Pub. L. 108–447 substituted "Board" for "board" in first sentence.
Amendment by Pub. L. 108–447 effective on the later of the date on which at least three persons nominated under section 604(a) of Pub. L. 108–447 take office or May 18, 2005, see section 604(b) of Pub. L. 108–447, set out in an Appointments; Effective Date; Transition note under section 831a of this title.


text: Alliant Credit Union Foundation Donates Nearly $200,000 in 2012 01/24/2013 Alliant Credit Union Foundation donated nearly $200,000 to charities and educational organizations during 2012, announced Foundation Chairman and Alliant Credit Union President & CEO David W. Mooney. The 501c3 not-for-profit Foundation was established through a $4 million grant from Alliant Credit Union. Both the Foundation and credit union are based in Chicago near O'Hare Airport. David Mooney presents nearly $5,000 to Marge Hamm of Bears Care, a Chicago Bears charity. The gift included employee donations to Alliant's Super Bowl Chili Day and a matching Foundation grant. Also pictured (from left) are Foundation President Wayne Rosenwinkel and Alliant Civic Affairs Committee members Janet Meinheit, Sherry Allen and Jill Okolita. Mr. Mooney said, "The purpose of the foundation is to promote economic empowerment and self-sufficiency of people, especially in communities around the country where Alliant Credit Union members and employees live and work." Causes eligible for Foundation support include: 1) those related to education with emphasis on financial literacy; 2) charities helping people in need of assistance; 3) investments in community development projects and programs, especially in underserved areas. Foundation beneficiaries in 2012 include: Operation HOPE, which promotes financial literacy and economic opportunity; Foster Care to Success, helping foster children become educated, successful adults; and Hadley School for the Blind, serving more than 10,000 students per year, worldwide. The Foundation also donated DVD sets containing Biz Kid$ TV programs to several public libraries. Foundation grants also paid for school supplies and reading books for students of Chicago's Prescott Elementary School. And, financial support was provided to the Business and Professional Women's Foundation, which helps military veterans and other women achieve their employment potential. Wayne Rosenwinkel presents Biz Kid$ DVD sets to Tina Martin of Arlington Heights, IL Memorial Library. Biz Kid$ teaches young people about making and managing money. During the year, Alliant's Foundation assisted a number of worthwhile charities through its association with the credit union's Civic Affairs Committee. The Foundation contributed to causes and events supported by Civic Affairs such as the Employee Volleyball Tournament, which raised money for National Multiple Sclerosis Society. Additional fundraising activities included the Plane Pull for Special Olympics, March of Dimes Blue Jeans for Babies Day and more. The Foundation also provided $15,000 in grants for United Airlines Fantasy Flights. These grants helped pay for holiday gifts and festivities for seriously ill and disadvantaged children who were treated to "North Pole" flights from ten major airports around the country. Alliant Credit Union Houston employee Alicia Bonilla presents an oversized check to Beth Brust of United Airlines. It represents a $1,500 Foundation donation to the Houston Fantasy Flight. The Foundation also involves Alliant employees through a Matching Donations Program. And according to Foundation President Wayne Rosenwinkel, there was a special program for 2012 called Grant a Grant. "This got its name from the $50 bill featuring President Grant," said Mr. Rosenwinkel. "Alliant employees were able to request a $50 grant for a charity of choice."


text:
DescriptionIn Xyanide drake is a star fighter pilot escorting an execution craft that holds the evil witch Aguira. On route, an asteroid filled with Xyanide (a substance that materializes thoughts) hits the prisoner's ship. Now, as Drake, you must battle through a series of surreal nightmares. While piloting skills and kill efficiency are important to survive, you must also learn how to adapt to your different environments. Morph into different types of fighters, master new weapons, and acquire power-ups to defeat your enemies. |
Product DetailsUPC: 896992000278Genre: Action, Shooter Platform: Xbox Region: NTSC (N. America) Rating: Teen |


text:
One character in the mystery-thriller Mindhunters notes, "At the end of the day, building a better mousetrap is just mechanics." Within that comment is the philosophy of director Renny Harlin and writers Wayne Kramer and Kevin Brodbin. Of course, their film is less Mousetrap than Ten Little Indians and less Ten Little Indians than Deep Blue Sea, a Renny Harlin action-thriller which also featured stupid people in a remote, tricked-out setting being picked off one by one.
This time, it's a bunch of FBI trainees taking their final exam to join the psychological profiling division. Someone's got to be ready to psychoanalyze serial killers or at least be available to the hundreds of screenwriters inventing serial killers every day. Anyway, I guess this makes them the "Mindhunters" of the title, but I'd just as soon chalk that title up to their brainlessness than their supposed profiling skill.
Val Kilmer plays Jake Harris, the unpredictable instructor who dumps the class on a remote island training facility. There, the competitive profiler candidates (Christian Slater, Kathryn Morris, Eion Bailey, Will Kemp, Clifton Collins Jr., Jonny Lee Miller, Patricia Velasquez) and an invited observer (James Todd Smith a.k.a. LL Cool J) quickly discover that this isn't a training exercise but the real thing. A serial killer among them is determined to be the last one standing after setting elaborate traps and turning each agent against the other.
Mindhunters has infamously gathered dust for two years as Dimension aborted three previous release dates. Maybe they were afraid of its cheesy 80s slickness (faux Hermann scoring meets bad guitar solos). They shouldn't have been so afraid, though, since Mindhunters is middle-of-the-road as far as bad movies go. Harlin brings a slick efficiency to silly action movies, even this one, and the cast has a good mix of established actors who bring camp value (Slater, Kilmer, and Cool J, in a variation on his Deep Blue Sea role) and serviceable fresh faces.
But if Mindhunters is rarely boring, it's never actually good, either. It's not one of those mysteries that dazzles with its brilliant resolution, but rather one of those mysteries that kills suspense by not giving any actual clues to the killer's identity or, indeed, making any psychological sense. Clues are doled out, but the few of them that have anything to do with the killer's identity are not criminology clues but screenwriting clues. The net result of this is an ending that feels like a slap in the face instead of a "gotcha" twist.
Based on what I thought were clues as I played along, I imagined an ending that would be more surprising and plausible than the actual ending. Arguably, that could be a good sign that a mystery is doing its job, but you haven't seen this ending. The killer wants to raise the bar from "tired old hacks like Bundy, Gacy, and Dahmer," but you'd best lower your expectations to enjoy the mechanics of this Saw-esque mousetrap.